There it was again, she would lie and he would believe her. When the occupation began, Uncle Bernard had warned them not to tell anybody they were Jewish. He said Vera was in danger, because her boss knew all about her. The fact that Mr Braun was so good to her, had given her a raise and helped find her a place to live, didn’t reassure him. After one of the girls at school had made everyone laugh by imitating Hannah’s accent, she’d decided the less she said the better. It was easier that way to keep who she was a secret.
‘I’m from Berlin, but my parents brought us here years ago. My father is in the tobacco business, imports and exports.’ She knew almost as much as Vera about that, so it was a safe lie.
‘Do you miss Berlin?’
‘I was a little girl when we left. I don’t remember much, except what a beautiful city it is.’
All the way to Amsterdam they exchanged enthusiastic opinions about German food and books and music. His father was the organist in the famous church in Ulm and had named him Johann Sebastian after the great composer Bach, but he had no musical talent. He told her how beautiful that church and city were, and then the train pulled into the station in Amsterdam, and they stood up and started for the door.
‘Do you live in Amsterdam?’ he asked. ‘I’m stationed here, and I would like very much to see you again. If you wish? If your parents will not mind?’ He knew that not every Dutch girl wanted to be seen with a soldier, but perhaps this one, being German herself, might. His blue eyes were focused on her lips, as though he could magic a yes out of them.
‘I’m hoping to get a job in a hospital,’ she said. ‘I’m going there now.’ They were standing on the platform near the open door of the train, and she could see by the big station clock that she had to go.
‘Let me walk a bit with you,’ he said, and started to take her arm. Then he dropped his hand and fell into step beside her. ‘Where must you be?’
‘It’s the hospital on the Prinsengracht. I think I can walk there.’
‘It’s not so nearby. Let’s take a tram. My headquarters are in that direction.’ He wanted to be with her as long as possible. It was flattering but frightening too. Out on the street waiting for the tram, Hannah was aware of disapproving looks. He was too, and he moved a few steps away as if they weren’t really together. He was a nice boy, and it surprised her how happy it made her feel to speak German after so many months. Anyway, why shouldn’t she like him? The occupation and the army that controlled everything they did weren’t his fault.
Riding through the city, he pointed out some of the buildings they passed, ‘That’s the biggest department store, very elegant, very modisch. We’re not allowed to go there, because it’s owned by Jews. Over there, that’s the palace. Nobody lives there. They have all left the country, but I am sure you know that.’
Hannah looked across the wide empty square at the block-long building. Over the doors stretched a long white banner with the words ‘V – Victory – Germany will win on all fronts for Europe’ printed on it in large black letters. She was tired of all the banners and posters and swastika flags the enemy hung up everywhere. Breast-beating, her uncle called it, like an ape claiming his piece of the jungle.
‘You must already get off at the next stop,’ Johann said, ‘and I don’t even know your name.’ When she told him, he laughed. ‘My grandmother’s name too! And you know,’ he hurried to say as she stood up, ‘you are as pretty as all German girls are!’
But I’m not, she thought, and she brushed past him and jumped out of the tram. Down on the pavement, she looked back. The doors had closed, but she could see him looking out at her, surprised by her sudden escape. She lifted a hand to wave and watched the tram move away.
She had liked the way he’d looked at her, the eager way he talked and the intent way he listened. But he’d made her feel foolish saying she was a pretty German girl. She thought of her school friend Trudie, her best friend who turned out not to be a friend after all. She was the pretty German girl, in her green dirndl dress and red apron and the big silk bow on top of her brown curls. She was the real thing, and Hannah was a fake. And everything she’d said to that handsome Johann Sebastian was a lie.
On the Prinsengracht, the wind ruffling the water and the winter sun turning the windows of the houses into mirrors, she walked along checking house numbers. Some of the beautiful old buildings were so big, it was hard to believe only one family lived in each one. The Germans had taken one for their headquarters. Two soldiers were standing guard at the front door, and three officers wearing belted overcoats and high black boots were just coming out. Someone had parked their car in the middle of the street as if they owned it. Well, they did now, didn’t they?
The hospital was built of the same rose-brown brick as most of the other buildings on the street. Its entrance was framed by white-painted columns and glass and wrought-iron lanterns that had once held candles.
Inside, at the top of a short flight of stairs, a young woman looked at her through a window in the wall. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Are you Miss Kormann? You’re late! No, it’s all right, just a few minutes, but you’d better hurry. Mrs Moll is up one flight in the last room down the hall on the left.’
Being late wasn’t a good beginning. Hannah ran up, found the closed door and knocked nervously. It was opened by a young man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging on his chest and a pipe held firmly between his teeth. Behind him she saw a desk, a pile of papers, a green glass and brass lamp, and a large-bosomed woman staring at her.
‘Come in, I’m leaving.’ The young doctor took his pipe out of his mouth and started out.
‘No,’ Mrs Moll ordered. ‘Stay. I’ll want your opinion.’ She pointed to a chair, and Hannah sat down on its edge. ‘Take off your coat and hat.’
She stood, did as she as told and sat again.
The young man leaned against the desk and smiled down at her. ‘I already have an opinion,’ he murmured.
‘Don’t be silly, Martin!’ Mrs Moll lifted her hand and waved her fingers. ‘We’ll start with your papers.’
Hannah laid her passport on the desk. The name and picture in it were hers, the stamp that showed when she’d come to Holland was genuine, and nothing in it suggested she was Jewish. Not sure whether it was wise, she put her diploma from the secretarial school down with it. She would have to explain that she hoped to work as a nurse’s aide.
While Mrs Moll looked at everything, the young doctor leaned against the desk, smiling at Hannah around his pipe. He was on her side, she could see that. If he had anything to say, she would be all right.
‘You didn’t expect to work as a secretary, I hope.’
Hannah shook her head.
‘Good. I can see your Dutch is good, and you have at least finished an education, but suppose you tell me what you know about nursing. That’s what we do here.’
It wasn’t, after all, a useless interview. Hannah explained about the first-aid course she’d taken in high school, and how she knew then she wanted to be a nurse. Of course she hadn’t done any sort of real training.
‘We’re grateful for every pair of hands we can get,’ Mrs Moll said. ‘If you come to us, you will live here in the building, and you will take classes in your free time and, eventually, and if all goes well, do your exams.’ Hannah nodded vigorously, and Mrs Moll asked, ‘Well, Martin, what do you think?’
‘Oh, absolutely, we need a young woman like this. By all means!’ and he waved his pipe at them.
She was told to come back on Monday. Her room would be ready, and she could start working the same day. She must bring her ration card and any stamps she had, sign out at the police registry in Utrecht and in for Amsterdam. The interview was over.
Martin came with her down the hall and helped her put on her coat. ‘You’ll like it here. She’s not an ogre, and she’s very good at her job. She’s good to the girls, don’t worry about that. We can’t promise you fancy meals, but we’re all right there too.’ He waved at her again wit
h his pipe and disappeared through the swinging doors at the foot of the staircase.
On her first day, she saw him running from his office to his examination room. A week later, he came up behind her in the hall and whispered, ‘How’s it going?’ When she turned to answer, he was already gone. She’d never met anybody who walked so fast.
The nurses all admired him and not just for his skill as a doctor. He made the sickest children laugh, he listened carefully when old patients complained, he even knew how to make hospital corners on sheets. More than anything, he didn’t treat them like servants or act as if they couldn’t possibly know what to do if he didn’t tell them.
Hannah was put to work in the children’s ward on the ground floor. The white-painted iron beds were arranged so that the little patients could look out at the garden.
Martin was not their doctor, that was an older man with a thick mustache that hid his mouth and made him hard to understand. Martin’s patients were the adults on the second floor, but he stopped in to see the children every evening before he went home. When it got dark and Hannah closed the curtains, they turned their faces toward the door to watch for him.
One evening she went with him to stand at the front door and look at the snow falling into the black water of the canal. When she shivered and turned to go in, he said, ‘Don’t go yet.’ Then he kissed her. Her hands were still in the pockets of her apron, his hung loose at his sides, and they did not embrace. They were the same height, and they simply leaned forward and let their lips meet.
‘Goodnight,’ he whispered and walked away.
She stood for a moment looking across at the German headquarters. All the rooms were lit, and shadows passed back and forth behind the windows. She thought of Johann Sebastian. Would she want to meet him again? He wanted to, she knew that, and he would have wanted to kiss her. Why did Martin want to kiss her? Had he kissed all the nurses? She hoped not, she hoped it meant something more than that.
In the morning, putting on her blue dress, her starched white apron and the little white cap the student nurses wore, she looked in the mirror and nodded. She was a pretty girl, with just enough wave in her dark hair and eyes that were gold-flecked green, and Martin had noticed. If she met him downstairs, suppose he only nodded and walked on. Would it mean he was sorry he’d kissed her? Or that he didn’t want anybody to see how he felt? And what was she supposed to do when she saw him? Smile, nod, wave, say good morning or disappear into the nearest closet? When the downstairs bell rang, she made a face at herself and ran out.
After all, everything was just the same. When he waved to her from down the hall, she smiled and went off down the stairs to the kitchen. He was late for lunch, and then he turned up with Mrs Moll, and they talked symptoms and treatments and paid no attention to the nurses who came and went.
When the children were in bed, they wanted the curtains open so that they could see their Christmas tree in the garden. It was a young pine tree she and Nettie had decorated with bows of red string and balls of white cotton. Everything hung a little limply after yesterday’s snowfall, but some of the children had never seen a Christmas tree before and loved it the way it was. She shut the door to the hall and turned the lights off, and the tree glimmered in the last rays of the sun. One of the little girls was humming, and another one was murmuring the words in Dutch. She had learned the song in German at school. ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,’ she’d sung it too, without really understanding why that silent night was holy.
Celebrating Christmas at school and not at home was confusing. Between the shoes and gloves in the window of her father’s shop, he laid twigs of mistletoe. But that was business, not religion, and when she told him about Jesus and the three Magi, he answered, ‘After all this time, who knows?’
One by one, the children fell asleep until, when Hannah stood up to go, one of them whispered, ‘Where’s the doctor?’
‘Oh,’ she whispered back, ‘he hasn’t forgotten you. He’s just very busy this evening. Tomorrow, for sure.’
Just as she started up the stairs to her room, he came down. ‘That’s good,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘I didn’t want to go home without seeing you.’
‘The children asked for you. I said you were busy but you’ll come tomorrow.’
‘I will,’ he said. He came down the last two steps, circled her waist with his hands and kissed her. ‘I didn’t want to go home without kissing you.’
She looked back through the swinging doors into the empty hall. ‘Be careful,’ she whispered.
‘Why?’ He laughed but moved away and let her start up the stairs. Then he pulled on the hem of her skirt to make her turn back to him. ‘Say goodnight Martin.’
‘Goodnight, Martin.’ She stopped herself just before she said thank you.
He rushed through the door and she heard him call goodnight to Mrs Moll. He didn’t want to go home without! She’d never met a man who could say something like that. He was so romantic!
Taking off the little ring her mother had given her when she left Berlin, it occurred to her that she’d never noticed whether Martin wore a wedding ring. Of course he wasn’t married, he wasn’t that kind. When she saw him again, she would look.
6 Jo, February 1941
When she opened the door, Jo called out ‘I’m home!’ but there was no answer. Her father was at the office, of course, and her mother not back from shopping, but then why was the door unlocked? She turned and looked at it, frowning. She had her key in her hand, had she unlocked it without thinking? There were no coats on the hooks in front of her, the kitchen door was closed and the apartment felt not just quiet but empty. Then there was a noise from her parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall, someone coughing. ‘Mama?’ She stood outside the bedroom door, not sure whether to go in.
‘Jo?’ It was a whisper.
Her mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, still in her coat, her fur scarf hanging off one shoulder, her hat crooked on the back of her head, and her hands covering her face.
‘Mama! What’s the matter?’
When she sat down next to her and tried to take her hands, her mother leaned away. ‘What is it? What happened?’ Once more, very slowly, she took her mother’s hands and pulled them down. Her palms and fingers were wet, and it took a moment for Jo to realize that they were stained with blood.
She knelt down and looked at her mother’s face. At first she saw the blood dripping from her nose and the tears wetting her cheeks, then the red broken skin on one side of her forehead and her bruised and swollen upper lip. Jacoba tried to turn her face away, but Jo touched it gently and turned it back toward herself.
‘Come, Mama, let me help you.’ She took her hat off and eased her coat from her shoulders.
Her mother lifted herself to let Jo pull the coat away, shook her arms out of the sleeves and held up her legs to have her shoes taken off. Her stockings were ripped on both knees, and there was blood there too.
‘Lie down. I’ll get some water,’ she ordered.
Jacoba sank back and then rolled over and laid her wet face against the satin quilt.
In the kitchen Jo put water in the kettle and set it to boil. There was cotton batting and bandaging in a box, a scissor in the drawer with the knives and, in the bathroom cabinet, a bottle of iodine. She knew what to do to stop the bleeding, but after that she would phone Dr Levie. If one of Mama’s bones was broken, she wouldn’t know.
Leaning against the counter waiting for the water to boil, she remembered what her mother had said at breakfast. ‘I wonder if you should go to school all alone. David, can’t you go with her?’
Jo protested. She’d been going on her own since the first day of high school when she was just twelve. It was only ten minutes on her bike, and she usually met Lysbet or one of the other girls along the way. Besides, there were lots of other people going to school or work. The streets were never empty in that part of the city.
‘She needs an escort
?’ her father asked. ‘In the daytime? Why?’
Embarrassed about how nervous she was, Jacoba shrugged. Their narrow street was quiet, but it ended at an avenue where young men came looking for something to amuse them. She couldn’t ignore the police and soldiers she saw everywhere when she went shopping or to visit a friend, and she wished the Jewish market wasn’t so far away.
The water boiled, and Jo poured it into a bowl and carried it into the bedroom. Kneeling down, she wet the cotton batting and tried gently to clean the blood off her mother's lips and chin. Jacoba frowned, trying not to cry. There was a thick clot of dried blood under her nose and the bleeding had stopped, but the bruise on her forehead was throbbing and, now that her face was washed, Jo saw that her chin was cut as well.
‘I’m going to get Dr Levie,’ she said, when she had finished with whatever she could do.
‘Don’t go! Don’t go out there!’
‘I won’t, Mama, I’ll phone him, and I’ll call Papa to come home. Lie still and rest.’
Nobody answered the doctor’s phone, and David’s clerk said he’d already left for the day. It seemed reasonable to wait until he came home before she went out, but after an hour Jo began to worry. Her mother asked over and over, ‘Is he coming?’ and each time she answered yes. But then she would look at Jacoba’s face and think that he too might have been attacked, might be hurt, bleeding, unable to find his way home.
When the street door slammed shut, and she heard him coming slowly up the stairs, Jo met him in the hall. ‘Papa, are you all right?’
‘Of course I am. What is that for a question? Jo, what?’
‘It’s Mama, in the bedroom. She was attacked, she's bleeding. I wanted to get Dr Levie, but I couldn’t leave her alone. Should I go?’
‘Yes, go,’ he urged her and pushed her toward the door. ‘Go!’
At the end of their street, Jo biked over the bridge and turned to ride along the river. Here the streets were narrow and quiet, uninteresting for the men like the ones that had punched and kicked her mother. Just the same, she looked back several times to make sure nobody was following her, and at every cross-street she speeded up.
The Time Between Page 6
